Toronto Garbage Strike - Day 38

Yes, it's still on. For just a little while yesterday it seems that the strike was over, a settlement reached and ratification vote to happen today. Now that's all on hold for some unknown reason.

We the citizens of this fair city are being kept in the dark about how much of the farm our mayor has given away. My councilors response to that question came via email and just says "I can assure you, however, that the agreement was within the parameters set by the Employee and Labour Relations Committee. "

A couple of things bother me about what I'm hearing. First, they did get a wage increase even though the non union city workers did not and they did get to keep the most obscene part of the whole deal. Something called "bankable sick days". Now this is something I had never heard of prior to this strike an doesn't that just show you how open and transparent our government is.

So very simply, if you work for the city you get 18 sick days a year. If you use 10 for example, you put 8 in a "bank". Same for all the following years of your career. When it's time to retire you can cash out 6 months of banked days at the then current wages. So days banked 25 years ago for example get paid out at current wage rate. Now some city workers have way more than 6 months of sick days left in the bank so it's no uncommon for them to be "sick" a lot during the last year prior to retirement. Nice little retirement handshake dontcha think...

Now as for the strike being/not being over today, I offer a simple explanation. There is a major cleanup needed and we have a long weekend starting on Saturday. The union wants their members to do the cleanup instead of private contractors. If they can drag this out into the weekend and start the cleanup then they get to work at double time and triple time for working on Monday. Nice little paycheck to make up some of the lost wages.

As soon as a tentative deal was announced on Monday, the pickets should have come down and the city should have made arrangements to start the cleanup. The mayor and his council did not instead called for a council meeting for Friday to vote on this agreement. Were they hoping to sneak something through on Friday night when most of us aren't paying attention? After all there is a long weekend coming and most people aren't paying attention.

I just hope they pay attention in November 2010 when these people are up for re election...